NASA seeks partners for projects

One giant leap for mankind. One small step for the GoDaddy Martian Rover?

With NASA’s budget unlikely to see a boost anytime soon, legislators and policymakers are left looking for a financial fix. Enter one option: selling private sponsorships to future NASA projects or vehicles.

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Robert Walker, a former Republican chairman of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee, floated that idea at a committee hearing on NASA’s strategic direction earlier this month.

Far-fetched? Maybe. But with federal appropriations declining each year since 2009, NASA needs to look outside Washington for a cash infusion, Walker says.

“Sponsorship brings in people who have no place in aerospace but see an opportunity to have their name associated with it,” he told POLITICO.

And lawmakers have more to grapple with than just the question of NASA resources: Washington can’t even agree on what exactly the agency’s job should be.

Congress and the White House have butted heads over NASA’s direction, with many on the Hill supporting new human exploration missions, such as going back to the moon. The White House, while not writing off that goal, has also promoted technology development and a research mission that would study samples of asteroids that come from deep space.

The two bodies were able to pass a space plan in the partisan political climate of 2010 that included components from both sides, noted David Weaver, the agency’s associate administrator for communications. But that deal has been described as a compromise that made no one happy rather than a road map for NASA’s future.

That lack of consensus among political leadership was the key finding of a report commissioned by Congress and released earlier this month. The administration, a National Research Council Committee concluded, needs to take the lead in “forging a new consensus on NASA’s future” and eliminate “the current mismatch between NASA’s budget and its portfolio of programs, facilities and staff.”

One way to do that, the report states, is by committing to cost-sharing deals with other government agencies and international partnerships. And, as Walker pointed out at the House hearing, there are private-sector options. That includes sponsorships, but it also encompasses partnerships that could solidify or increase NASA’s access to technology or projects developed by innovative space companies like Space X or Virgin Galactic.

“We now are hiring folks to transport our supplies to the space station, and eventually very soon, we’ll be hiring companies to take our astronauts to the space station,” he said. “That’s going to save us money — money that we will then plow into the development of the most powerful rocket ever developed and a space capsule that will take our astronauts further than we’ve ever gone before.”